As you wait, you notice the girl’s father, the miller (the former miller), seated among the members of court, in a three-cornered hat and ermine collar. He regards the line of assembled supplicants with a dowager aunt’s indignity; with an expression of superiority and sentimental piety — the recently bankrupt man who gambled with his daughter’s life, and happens, thanks to you, to have won.
When your turn arrives, you bow to queen and king. The king nods his traditional, absentminded acknowledgment. His head might have been carved from marble. His eyes are ice-blue under the rim of his gem-encrusted crown. He might already be, in life, the stone version that will top his sarcophagus.
You say, “My queen, I think you know what I’ve come for.”
The king looks disapprovingly at his wife. His face bears no hint of question. He skips over the possibility of innocence. He only wonders what, exactly, it is she must have done.
The queen nods. You can’t tell what’s going through her mind. She’s learned, apparently, during the past year, how to evince an expression of royal opacity, which she did not possess when you were spinning the straw into gold for her.
She says, “Please reconsider.”
You’re not about to reconsider. You might have considered reconsidering before you found yourself in the presence of these two, this tyrannical and ignorant monarch and the girl who agreed to marry him.
You tell her that a promise was made. You leave it at that. She glances over at the king, and can’t conceal a moment of miller’s-daughter nervousness.
She turns to you again. She says, “This is awkward, isn’t it?”
You waver. You’re assaulted by conflicting emotions. You understand the position she’s in. You care for her. You’re in love with her. It’s probably the hopeless ferocity of your love that impels you to stand firm, to refuse her refusal — she who has on one hand succeeded spectacularly and, on the other, consented to what has to be, at best, a cold and brutal marriage. You can’t simply relent and walk back out of the room. You can’t bring yourself to be so debased.
She doesn’t care for you, after all. You’re someone who did her a favor, once. She doesn’t even know your name.
With that thought, you decide to offer a compromise.
You tell her she has three days to guess your name, in the general spirit of her husband’s fixation on threes. If she can accomplish that, if she can guess your name within the next three days, the deal’s off.
If she can’t …
You do not of course say this aloud, but if she can’t, you’ll raise the child in a forest glade. You’ll teach him the botanical names of the trees, and the secret names of the animals. You’ll instruct him in the arts of mercy and patience. And you’ll see, in the boy, certain of her aspects — the great dark pools of her eyes, maybe, or her slightly exaggerated, aristocratic nose.
The queen nods in agreement. The king scowls. He can’t, however, ask questions, not here, not with his subjects lined up before him. He can’t appear to be baffled, underinformed, misused.
You bow again and, as straight-backed as your torqued spine will allow it, you back out of the throne room.
* * *
You’ll never know what went on between queen and king once they were alone together. You hope she confessed everything, and insisted that a vow, once made, can’t be broken. You even go so far as to imagine she might defend you for your offer of a possible reprieve.
You suspect, though, that she still feels endangered; that she can’t be sure her husband will forgive her for allowing him to believe she herself had spun the straw into gold. Having produced a male heir she has now, after all, rendered herself dispensable. And so, when confronted, she probably came up with … some tale of spells and curses, some fabrication in which you, a hobgoblin, are entirely to blame.
You wish you could feel more purely angry about that possibility. You wish you didn’t sympathize, not even a little, with her, in the predicament she’s created for herself.
This, then, is love. This is the experience from which you’ve felt exiled for so long. This rage mixed up with empathy; this simultaneous desire for admiration and victory.
You wish you found it more unpleasant. Or, at any rate, you wish you found it as unpleasant as it actually is.
* * *
The queen sends messengers out all over the kingdom, in an attempt to track down your name. You know how futile that is. You live in a cottage carved into a tree, so deep in the woods that no hiker or wanderer has ever passed by. You have no friends, and your relatives live not only far away but in residences at least as obscure as your own (consider Aunt Farfalee’s tiny grotto, reachable only by swimming fifty feet underwater). You’re not registered anywhere. You’ve never signed anything.
You return to the castle the next day, and the next. The king scowls murderously (what story has he been told?) as the queen runs through a gamut of guesses.
Althalos? Borin? Cassius? Cedric? Destrain? Fendrel? Hadrian? Gavin? Gregory? Lief? Merek? Rowan? Rulf? Sadon? Tybalt? Xalvador? Zane?
No no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no and no.
It’s looking good.
But then, on the night of the second day, you make your fatal mistake. You’ll wonder, afterward — why did I build a fire in front of the cottage tree, and do that little song and dance? It seemed harmless at the time, and you were so happy, so sure. You’d found yourself sitting alone in your parlor, thinking of where the cradle should go, wondering who’d teach you to fold a diaper, picturing the child’s face as he looks up into yours and says, Father.
It’s too much, just sitting inside like that, by yourself. It’s too little. You hurry out into the blackness of the forest night, into the chirruping of the insects and the far-off hoots of the owls. You build a fire. You grant yourself a pint of ale, and then you grant yourself another.
And, almost against your own will, it seems that you’re dancing around the fire. It seems that you’ve made up a song.
Tonight I brew, tomorrow I bake,
And then the queen’s child I will take.
For little knows the royal dame …
How likely is it that the youngest of the queen’s messengers, the one most desperate for advancement, the one who’s been threatened with dismissal (he’s too avid and dramatic in his delivery of messages, he bows too low, he’s getting on the king’s nerves) … how likely is it that that particular young hustler, knowing every inch of the civilized kingdom to have been scoured already, every door knocked on, thought to go out into the woods that night, wondering if he was wasting precious time but hoping that maybe, maybe, the little man lived off the grid …
How likely is it that he sees your fire, creeps through the bracken, and listens to the ditty you’re singing?
* * *
You return, triumphant, to the castle on the third and final afternoon. You are for the first time in your life a figure of power, of threat. Finally, you cannot be ignored or dismissed.
The queen appears to be flustered. She says, “Well, then, this is my last chance.”
You have the courtesy to refrain from answering.
She says, “Is it Brom?”
No.
“Is it Leofrick?”
No.
“Is it Ulric?”
No.
Then there is a moment — a millimoment, the tiniest imaginable fraction of time — when the queen thinks of giving her baby to you. You see it on her face. There’s a moment when she knows she could rescue you as you once rescued her; when she imagines throwing it all away and going off with you and her child. She does not, could not, love you, but she remembers standing in the room on that first night, when the straw started turning to gold; when she understood that an impossible situation had been met with an impossible result; when she thoughtlessly laid her hand on the sackcloth-covered gnarls of your shoulder … She thinks (whoosh, by the time you’ve read whoosh, she’s no longer thinking of it) that she could leave her heartless husband, she could live in the woods with you and the child …